Weekend News Digest

Hundreds of Iraqis protested in the southern city of Kut against U.S. forces and the provincial governor also condemned the military operation.

The U.S. military had any immediate comment on the Iraqi stance but said the raid was carried out with the full approval of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government.

After President Barack Obama released four memos this month revealing the Bush administration’s legal justification for methods such as waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning — Cheney called for declassifying any memos showing that these techniques succeeded in producing valuable information.

“No, I don’t think it’s necessary, to be honest with you,” McCain told the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

“The unions have come to the table over and over and over again and have taken huge cuts,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow on the sidelines of a Michigan Democratic Party fundraising event in Detroit, the heart of the beleaguered U.S. auto industry.

“It is now incumbent on the creditors, in particular those that have taken public funds, to make some concessions and be a part of the solution,” Stabenow said.

“We’re hopeful this is all going to work out in a successful way,” Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s senior economic adviser and co-leader of the government’s task force working to restructure the auto industry, told the “Fox News Sunday” program with the automaker facing a Thursday deadline to arrange viable business plan. “It’s something we want to see.”

Summers cited some gains in talks on multiple fronts but was not specific.

Investors whose burst of optimism sent stocks higher Friday will see if their bets – which came in part on some stronger-than-expected earnings reports – were well-founded. Hundreds of companies will be reporting their first-quarter results and their outlooks for the coming months.

“Companies that are being challenged will continue to be challenged, but the market is looking past what happened last quarter and looking more ahead to what’s going to happen later this year,” said Jason Ronovech, portfolio manager for Paradigm Capital Management in Albany, N.Y.

At least 31 people were killed in the offensive, which sent some residents of Lower Dir district fleeing carrying small children and few belongings.

The operation appeared to endanger a peace pact struck with Taliban militants in neighboring Swat Valley, although a top official insisted the deal was “intact.” Another official demanded the insurgents disarm, but a Taliban spokesman said the militants would not give up their weapons.

The fracas over who was responsible for authorizing use of the simulated drowning tactic and other harsh techniques on captured suspect Abu Zubayda is raising new questions about that 2002 decision and follow-up moves that allowed the CIA to use the now-banned techniques.

Some former Bush officials argue that they were not properly warned by CIA officials about the potential perils of the severe methods, while others insist there were explicit cautions.

“The global economy has deteriorated dramatically … Developing countries face especially serious consequences as the financial and economic crisis turns into a human and development calamity,” they said in a statement.

The crisis “has already driven more than 50 million people into extreme poverty … We must alleviate its impact on developing countries and facilitate their contribution to global recovery.”

“Everybody is happy with what has been done on fiscal stimulus … all agree on the absolute necessity of cleansing the financial system,” IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn said after a meeting of the fund’s steering committee.

The IMF chief said that during discussions of the IMF board’s International Monetary and Financial Committee, it had become clear there was no longer any major disagreement over how to tackle the crisis.

Within the 816-billion-euro headline sum (1,080 billion dollars), 355 billion euros are held in the network of Germany’s regional state banks, according to the document revealed by the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the online edition of Der Spiegel magazine.

Another 268 billion euros is attributed to the troubled Hypo Real Estate bank, which on Friday moved a step closer to becoming Germany’s first full nationalisation since 1949.

As his caravan crawled down the main road of this south Indian city, the movie-star-turned-politician bowed toward the women getting trampled and the driver who abandoned his car, doors still open, to join the raucous crowd.

Chiranjeevi, the beloved hero of 149 adventure-romance films, has quickly become a political force since leaving Tollywood, the Telugu-language film industry that he ruled for three decades, to found his own party and contest elections in the key state of Andhra Pradesh.

But on May 15, the German-language version of the Broadway hit “The Producers” is opening at the Admiralspalast theater, and so far no one seems to be complaining.

Three years ago, a Hebrew-language production played in Tel Aviv to packed and laughing audiences. Then a German production was staged in Austria, Adolf Hitler’s birthplace. Now the same troupe is bringing the show to the German capital.

Yemen’s Jews, here and elsewhere in the country, are thought to have roots dating back nearly 3,000 years to King Solomon. The community used to number 60,000 but shrank dramatically when most left for the newborn state of Israel.

Those remaining, variously estimated to number 250 to 400, are feeling new and sometimes violent pressure from Yemeni Muslims, lately inflamed by Israel’s fierce offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza that cost over 1,000 Palestinian lives.

Results showed that a left-wing coalition made up of the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left Green Movement won 34 out of the 63 seats in Parliament.

With 97.9 percent of the votes tallied, the Social Democrats won 30.5 percent of the vote, or 20 parliamentary seats, while the Left-Green Movement won 21.5 percent, or 14 seats. Both parties have long said they will form a coalition government. The left-wing coalition is led by interim Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir.

The two guards from the Afghan Public Protection Force were the first members of the new program to die in the line of duty, said Shahidullah Shahid, the spokesman for Wardak province’s governor. Three vehicles were patrolling in Nirkh district of Wardak when the explosion ripped through one truck, he said.

The program trains and equips villagers to provide security in their own areas. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Wardak last week to inspect the program and said early reviews were positive.

The ministers from the 185 member countries of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said the crisis should not be allowed to set back progress made in recent years under targets set by the U.N. to halve poverty by 2015.

“A clear message must go out from this meeting, that despite the crisis, we will not allow achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to be jeopardized,” German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul told the joint IMF-World Bank Development Committee.

The agreements are the latest sign of warming ties between the former Cold War adversaries under the year-old administration of Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, who ran for office promising to improve the economy through closer ties with the mainland.

The centerpiece of the latest cross-strait talks, the third since Ma took office, is an agreement setting up a regulatory framework for financial services firms on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to invest and do business in each others’ markets.

Polling stations were busy into the afternoon across the volatile Andean country of 14 million people known as much for toppling presidents as its Galapagos Islands and remote Amazon tribes.

A Correa win would confirm him as the most powerful leader in Ecuador’s 30-year-old democracy and mark another victory for a generation of left-wing presidents like Venezuelan Hugo Chavez who govern most countries in the region.

Surveys late Saturday predicted the economist would win 49 percent of Sunday’s presidential vote, but it remained uncertain if his party would garner a majority in the congress, key for the pursuit of his socialist revolution.

Correa has taken a tough stance with investors and refused to repay foreign debt, in moves welcomed by supporters who blame the effects of the economic crisis on foreign liberalism.

In a vote that caused lively and sometimes heated debate, 51.3 percent of those that voted were against allowing children in secondary schools the choice of taking religion instead of ethics, final results showed.

The opposing side scored 48.5 percent but even if it had inched ahead and won, turnout was too low for the referendum to have been valid with only 14.2 percent of Berliner’s 2.4 million voters ticking the “yes” box.

Video posted on the Internet shows students hurling furniture and street signs into the flames on Saturday night as a SWAT team in riot gear converged on the crowd. Kent police said the party grew violent after one reveler was arrested and students began pelting officers with bottles, bricks and rocks.

It was the first violent clash between Kent State students and police in years. In 1970, four Kent State students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the invasion of Cambodia.

However, any questions lingering under the Iowa Supreme Court’s April 3 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage aren’t expected to slow the initial rush to county recorder offices.

And while Iowa requires a three-day waiting period before marriages can occur, judges may waive that delay and allow immediate weddings. At least one pro-gay marriage group is counting on waivers and has announced its members will hand out bouquets to newly married couples Monday in five of Iowa’s larger cities.

Families were hurt, and empty shops and lines at the food bank show that the town was, too. One rental agency says nearly 70 percent of its properties are vacant. The City Council even sought a federal disaster designation because of the lingering effects of the raid on the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse.

“At what point do we acknowledge that the system is so broken that we’re no longer willing to participate?” wondered Maryn Olson, a coordinator with Postville Response Coalition, a group established after the raid.

Pressured to take an early retirement in April, Martinez had been pinning his hopes on GM’s once-generous pensions and health-care benefits to help look after his four children and his disabled father, also a GM hourly retiree.

But with the 100-year-old industrial icon teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Martinez and the nearly 1 million other Americans who rely on the automaker for healthcare and pensions face new risks and heightened uncertainty.

The Federal Open Market Committee, which opens a two-day meeting on Tuesday, is likely to signal no change in policy since its March gathering, when it added over one trillion dollars to its arsenal to fight the economic crisis.

The FOMC statement due Wednesday is expected to depict a weak economy that still needs extraordinary support, justifying its policy of near-zero interest rates and vast lending facilities to pump up credit availability.

Holder spoke to The Associated Press during a flight to London, the first of several stops where he will visit with European leaders to discuss terrorism, drugs, and cyber-crime.

The attorney general did not say how much longer he thought it would take to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. Before officials can meet President Barack Obama’s January deadline, the U.S. must first decide which detainees to put on trial and which to release to the U.S. or other countries.

The White House had hoped to put the matter behind it by letting the attorney general make that call.

Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogations policies. But they stopped short of demanding charges against the Bush-era lawyers and other officials who devised the policies that critics have denounced as torture.

The problems at Forward Operating Bases Delta and Hammer include a lack of vehicles used to properly protect the two posts, a shortage of weapons and night vision gear, and poorly trained guards. Both bases house several thousand U.S. military personnel.

Concerned the shortages leave the bases vulnerable, the Commission on Wartime Contracting alerted military officials in Iraq and at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla.

The economic nosedive is turning into a human and development “calamity,” which already has driven more than 50 million people into extreme poverty this year, the World Bank’s policy steering committee said in a communique issued at the close of its spring meeting.

“There is widespread recognition that the world faces an unprecedented economic crisis, poor people could suffer the most and that we must continue to act in real time to prevent a human catastrophe,” World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said.

In a dizzying dash to the 100-day mark, Obama made a down payment on the changes he’d promised and delivered a trillion-dollar wallop to wake up the moribund economy. He put the country on track to end one war, reorient another and redefine what it means to be a superpower.

All this with a cool confidence that has made increasing numbers of Americans hopeful that the country may at last be heading in the right direction.

Not so Barack Obama. Today, such a joke would probably involve references to caffeine, hundred-yard dashes and the fast-forward button. Rarely has an American administration sprinted from the starting gate in a manner so vigorous, so sweeping, so sharply different from its predecessor.

Over and over he repeated it as he barnstormed across the land to secure our votes. Change you can believe in. The change we need. Change for America. Change, change, change. On Election Night, he said this: “Tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

President Barack Obama, a Democrat who took office in January, called the meeting last month to relaunch a process that began under his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, whose commitment to curbing climate change was viewed with skepticism by much of the world.

The stakes are higher now. The Kyoto Protocol, which caps greenhouse gas emissions, runs out in 2012 and leaders from around the globe will gather in Copenhagen in December to forge a successor treaty. Environmentalists hope renewed engagement by the United States and Obama’s push for U.S. leadership on the issue will result in a deal.

Completing the Doha round of talks would help pull the global economy out of recession by unleashing new trade flows and “help restore confidence at this moment of crisis,” Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s director general, said at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“I cannot restart a political process without the U.S. being ready,” Lamy said.

The Obama administration has pledged to “reset” relations with Russia after they reached post-Cold War lows under former President George W. Bush, most recently over Russia’s war with Georgia and the planned U.S. anti-missile system.

“Russia does not accept being treated as a junior partner. Russia has enough grounds to count on equal partnership, not just be given marks as a pupil,” Kudrin said in a speech in Washington where he is meeting G20 finance ministers.

Yet the new president’s agenda still faces tests of fire posed by a punishing economic crisis, the scheming of US allies and foes abroad and a poisoned political environment back home.

“It is clearly the most ambitious agenda at least since the 1960s,” said Princeton University historian and political scientist Julian Zelizer.

“I know some people say, let’s turn the page. Frankly, I’d like to read the page before we turn it,” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy told CBS television’s “Face the Nation” program.

“Why not have a nonpartisan or bipartisan commission do it, like we did in 9/11, and just go back and find everything that happened?” said the Democratic senator, referring to the investigative panel assembled in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

In his first 100 days in office, Obama has announced plans to withdraw most US combat troops from Iraq before 2011 while ordering an escalation of the US commitment in Afghanistan, approving the deployment of 21,000 reinforcements.

His new strategy for the Afghan war places Pakistan at the center of efforts to turn the tide against emboldened Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants, whose advances on both sides of the Afghan border have raised global alarm.

While the only deaths have been in Mexico, the flu is spreading with 20 cases in the United States and six in Canada, and possible cases as far afield as Europe and New Zealand.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said most of the roughly 1,300 people in Mexico suspected of having this new strain of swine flu have been given a clean bill of health. He said more than 900 people had been declared healthy. Nearly 400 were in hospitals being checked.

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard said two more people died of swine flu overnight in the overcrowded capital, and three other deaths are suspected to have been caused by the strain. Another 73 more people were hospitalized with influenza, possibly swine flu.

President Felipe Calderon has assumed new powers to isolate people infected with the deadly swine flu strain that health officials say has killed up to 86 people and likely sickened about 1,400 in the country since April 13.

Nations from New Zealand to Spain also reported suspected cases and some warned citizens against travel to North America while others planned quarantines, tightened rules on pork imports and tested airline passengers for fevers.

Nova Scotia’s chief public health officer, Dr. Robert Strang, said the east coast Canadian province had confirmed four “very mild” cases of swine flu in students ranging in age from 12 to 17 or 18. All are recovering, he said.

New York officials previously had characterized the cases as probable, but Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that it was swine flu, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

About 100 students at St. Francis Preparatory School complained of flu-like symptoms; further tests will determine how many of those cases are swine flu.

The United States will screen visitors arriving in the US from infected areas, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, as 20 cases were confirmed in five states.

Suspected cases were also being investigated in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and six new infections were confirmed in Canada.

Mexico, the outbreak’s epicenter with up to 86 suspected deaths, closed churches, markets and restaurants. Few people ventured onto the streets, and some wore face masks. Canada became the third country to confirm cases, in six people, including some students who – like some New York City spring-breakers – got mildly ill in Mexico. Countries across Asia promised to quarantine feverish travelers returning from flu-affected areas.

The U.S. declared the health emergency so it could ship roughly 12 million doses of flu-fighting medications from a federal stockpile to states in case they eventually need them – although with 20 confirmed cases of people recovering easily, they don’t appear to for now.

Is this the next big global flu epidemic that public health experts have long anticipated and worried about? Is this the novel virus that will kill millions around the world, as pandemics did in 1918, 1957 and 1968?

The short answer is it’s too soon to tell.

The outbreak is yet another distraction for President Barack Obama as he focuses on rescuing the economy from its worst crisis in decades. His administration will also be mindful of the damage to former President George W. Bush over his government’s inept handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“At this point, a top priority is to ensure that communication is robust and that medical surveillance efforts are fully activated,” John Brennan, assistant to the president for Homeland Security, told a White House briefing.

President Barack Obama is monitoring the spreading virus and has reviewed US capabilities to counter the deadly flu outbreak, which has killed up to 81 people in Mexico, White House homeland security advisor John Brennan told reporters.

Obama has ordered a “very active, aggressive, and coordinated response,” Brennan said.